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Using session recording

The Session recording functionality enables you to save your visitors’ actions on your website in video format. This helps you understand their behavior on your website and identify users’ sticking points and browsing issues based on real-life situations.

In order for session recording to work, you need to implement the tag on all the pages of your website.

Creating a recording

When creating a recording, specify the URL of the page(s) for which you want to record visitor behavior. Each recording includes several videos featuring the users’ various visits to the pages of your website.

If you are using Session recording for the first time, the Recording name field displayed by default is empty. You need to fill it in to configure your first recording.

Enter the desired label in the Recording name field,

Click Add,

Insert the URL of the website and, where applicable, specify the shared structure of the various URLs using the Corresponds exactly, URL ignoring parameters, Contains and Regular expression operators (see How do I target a test by URL?),

Click Save,

To create additional recordings, click Add a new recording and repeat steps 3 to 6.

You are now ready to create videos on your pages. For more information, refer to Creating videos.

You can create as many videos as your quota allows. The number of videos created and deducted from your daily quota is available on the recordings page.

If you want to hide certain elements to make sure they don’t appear on the video, you can do so manually, even though visitor confidentiality is protected by default. For more information, refer to Hiding elements during recording.

Hiding elements during recording

Before you start recording visits to your website, you can blur specific information by adding the data-ab_disable_record data attribute to a given HTML element.

Deleting a recording

To delete a session recording and all the videos it contains, click Delete recording and confirm deletion.

Creating videos

As soon as you click Start recording, all user visits to your website are recorded. The duration of each video coincides with the amount of time the visitor spent on the website.

The number of videos recorded is displayed for each recording.

Accessing the videos

To access the videos, click View recordings: a new tab opens with the list of recorded sessions.

A new line is created for each new session recording.

The following information is available for every session:

Whether or not the video is bookmarked

Visitor’s country and city (or truncated IP address)

Date of visit

Recording duration

Activity level (high, average, low)

Video play button

Browser, operating system and device used by the visitor

Tags or keywords used to categorize the video

Tag creation button

Video download button

Video deletion button

Filtering and sorting sessions

You can filter and sort the sessions included in each recording. This makes them easier to find.

Filter bar

Click Filters to display the various filtering criteria available,

Use the drop-down lists to apply your desired criteria:

Video start and end date

Minimum and maximum duration

Browser type and version

Operating system type and version

Visitor’s country

Activity level

Device used by the visitor (desktop computer, tablet or smartphone)

Once you’ve finished selecting the criteria, click Apply: The list is updated and only the videos that match the criteria are displayed.

If necessary, click Reset to delete all filters at once.

Filtering by test and by variation

Videos can be filtered based on personalizations or tests, as well as based on the variations the visitors were subjected to.

To do this,

Click Filter by test,

Select the desired personalization(s) using the drop-down list,

If applicable, select a variation:The list is updated and only the videos that match the criteria are displayed.

Filtering by page

You can filter videos to display only the page(s) viewed by the visitors.

To do this,

Click Filter by page,

Select one or more pages: The list is updated and only the videos that match the criteria are displayed.

To deselect pages, click Pages selected, then click .

You can select several pages at once and compile the results.

Sorting sessions

You can sort the list of sessions based on the following criteria:

date,

recording duration,

visitor’s activity level.

To do this, click the arrows in the column header.

You can only apply one sorting criterion at a time. They cannot be combined.

Bookmarking

Videos can be bookmarked.

To do this,

Click Bookmark this recording next to the videos you want to save for later,

Click Display bookmarks to filter the list of videos,

Click Display bookmarks again to return to the default list.

Adding tags

You can add tags to categorize your videos and filter them by test and by variation, as well as according to certain native targeting criteria (device, browser, user behavior, type of traffic acquisition).